by Lee Child
“I doubt it. Why?”
“Because I might need to know. To prove I didn’t make a mistake.”
I said nothing.
“You made mistakes,” Willard said.
“Did I?”
He nodded. “I can’t decide whether you’re an idiot or whether you’re doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Are you trying to embarrass the army?”
“What?”
“What’s the big picture here, Major?” he said.
“You tell me, Colonel.”
“The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we’ve got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the cut. And you know what?”
“What?”
“The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The Air Force has got all those glamorous airplanes. The Navy has got submarines and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we’re stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile. The army is boring, Reacher. That’s the view in Washington.”
“So?”
“This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ’s sake. An elite unit has got perverts in it? You think the army needs for people to know that? At a time like this? You should have written him up as a training accident.”
“That wouldn’t have been true.”
“Who cares?”
“He wasn’t killed because of his orientation.”
“Of course he was.”
“I do this stuff for a living,” I said. “And I say he wasn’t.”
He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.
“OK,” he said. “We’ll come back to that. Who else but you saw the body?”
“My guys,” I said. “Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an opinion from. Plus the pathologist.”
He nodded. “You deal with your guys. I’ll tell Psy-Ops and the doctor.”
“Tell them what?”
“That we’re writing it up as a training accident. They’ll understand. No harm, no foul. No investigation.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?”
“The sergeants want an investigation.”
“I’m pretty sure their CO won’t. Believe me. You can take that as gospel.”
“You’ll have to give me a direct order,” I said. “Words of one syllable.”
“Watch my lips,” Willard said. “Do not investigate the fag. Write a situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A night maneuver, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order.”
“I’ll need it in writing,” I said.
“Grow up,” he said.
We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.
“What was the time of death?” he asked.
“Nine or ten last night,” I said.
“And you were off-post until eleven?”
“Asked and answered,” I said.
“Can you prove that?”
I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.
“Do I have to?” I said.
He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.
“Next item,” he said. “You claim the butt-bandit wasn’t killed because he was a butt-bandit. What’s your evidence?”
“The crime scene was overdone,” I said.
“To obscure the real motive?”
I nodded. “That’s my judgment.”
“What was the real motive?”
“I don’t know. That would have required an investigation.”
“Let’s speculate,” Willard said. “Let’s assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how.”
“The usual way,” I said. “By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone’s part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of.”
“To silence him, in other words.”
“To dead-end something,” I said. “That would be my guess.”
“And you do this stuff for a living.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“How would you have located this person?”
“By conducting an investigation.”
Willard nodded. “And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?”
“I would have taken him into custody,” I said. Protective custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone’s squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.
“And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?”
I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.
“Verified via strength lists and gate logs,” I said.
“Facts,” Willard said. “I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn’t it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn’t it occur to you that someone recorded as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?”
“Unlikely,” I said. “It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night.”
“The patrols might have missed a trained man.”
“Unlikely,” I said again. “And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?”
“Prearranged location.”
“It wasn’t a location,” I said. “It was just a spot near the track.”
“Map reference, then.”
“Unlikely,” I said, for the third time.
“But possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?”
“Anything’s possible,” I said again.
“What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?”
“I don’t know. I would have to work out the distance he walked.”
“Maybe he ran.”
“Maybe he did.”
“In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate.”
I said nothing.
“Best guess,” Willard said. “How much time?”
“An hour or two.”
He nodded. “So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?”
“Possible,” I said.
“And the motive would have been to dead-end something.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route.”
I said nothing.
“And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two hours that you can’t account for.”
I said nothing. Willard smiled.
“And you arrived at the gate out of breath,” he said. “I checked.”
I didn’t reply.
“But what would have been your motive?” he said.
“I assume you didn’t know Carbone well. I assume you don’t move in the same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you don’t.”
“You’re wasting your time,” I said. “And you’re making a big mistake. Because you really don’t want to make an enemy out of me.”
“Don’t I?”
“No,” I said. “You really don’t.”
“What do you need dead-ended?” he asked me.
I said nothing.
“Here’s an interesting fact,” Willard said. “Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint against you.”
He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk. There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a place and a time. The date was January second, the place was Fort Bird’s Provost Marshal’s office, and the time was 0845. Then came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving Military Police Major named Reacher strike the first civilian with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defense. Then came a signature with Carbone’s name and number typed below it. I recognized the number from Carbone’s file. I looked up at the slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind, slipping out of the bar door into the parking lot, looking at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper inside.
“Delta Force looks after its own,” Willard said. “We all know that. I guess it’s part of their mystique. So what are they going to do now? One of their own is beaten to death after lodging a complaint against a smart-ass MP major, and the smart-ass MP major in question needs to save his career, and he can’t exactly account for his time on the night it went down?”
I said nothing.
“The Delta CO’s office gets its own copy,” Willard said. “Standard procedure with disciplinary complaints. Multiple copies all over the place. So the news will leak very soon. Then they’ll be asking questions. So what shall I tell them? I could tell them you’re definitely not a suspect. Or I could suggest you definitely are a suspect, but there’s some type of technicality in the way that means I can’t touch you. I could see how their sense of right and wrong deals with that kind of injustice.”
I said nothing.
“It’s the only complaint Carbone ever made,” he said. “In a sixteen-year career. I checked that too. And it stands to reason. A guy like that has to keep his head down. But Delta as a whole will see some significance in it. Carbone comes up over the parapet for the first time in his life, they’re going to think you boys had some previous history. They’ll think it was a grudge match. Won’t make them like you any better.”
I said nothing.
“So what should I do?” Willard said. “Should I go over there and drop some hints about awkward legal technicalities? Or shall we trade? I keep Delta off your back, and you start toeing the line?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t really think you killed him,” he said. “Not even you would go that far. But I wouldn’t have minded if you had. Fags in the army deserve to be killed. They’re here under false pretenses. You would have chosen the wrong reason, is all.”
“It’s an empty threat,” I said. “You never told me he lodged the complaint. You didn’t show it to me yesterday. You never gave me a name.”
“Their sergeants’ mess won’t buy that for a second. You’re a special unit investigator. You do this stuff for a living. Easy enough for you to weasel a name out of all the paperwork they think we do.”
I said nothing.
“Wake up, Major,” Willard said. “Get with the program. Garber’s gone. We’re going to do things my way now.”
“You’re making a mistake,” I said. “Making an enemy out of me.”
He shook his head. “I don’t agree. I’m not making a mistake. And I’m not making an enemy out of you. I’m bringing this unit into line, is all. You’ll thank me later. All of you. The world is changing. I can see the big picture.”
I said nothing.
“Help the army,” he said. “And help yourself at the same time.”
I said nothing.
“Do we have a deal?” he said.
I didn’t reply. He winked at me.
“I think we have a deal,” he said. “You’re not that dumb.”
He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door behind him. I sat there and watched the stiff vinyl cushion on my visitor’s chair regain its shape. It happened slowly, with quiet hissing sounds as air leaked back into it.
ten
The world is changing. I had always been a loner, but at that point I started to feel lonely. And I had always been a cynic, but at that point I began to feel hopelessly naive. Both of my families were disappearing out from under me, one because of simple relentless chronology, and the other because its reliable old values seemed suddenly to be evaporating. I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.
Summer came back three minutes later. I guessed she had been hiding around a corner, waiting for Willard to leave. She had folds of printer paper under her arm, and big news in her eyes.
“Vassell and Coomer were here again last night,” she said. “They’re listed on the gate log.”
“Sit down,” I said.
She paused, surprised, and then she sat where Willard had.
“I’m toxic,” I said. “You should walk away from me right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were right,” I said. “Fort Bird is a very embarrassing place. First Kramer, then Carbone. Willard is closing both cases down, to spare the army’s blushes.”
“He can’t close Carbone down.”
“Training accident,” I said. “Carbone tripped and fell and hit his head.”
“What?”
“Willard’s using it as a test for me. Am I with the program or not?”
“Are you?”
I didn’t answer.
“They’re illegal orders,” Summer said. “They have to be.”
“Are you prepared to challenge them?”
She didn’t reply. The only practical way to challenge illegal orders was to disobey them and then take your chances with the resulting general court-martial, which would inevitably become a mano a mano struggle with a guy way higher on the food chain, in front of a presiding judge who was well aware of the army’s preference that orders should never be questioned.
“So nothing ever happened,” I said. “Bring all your paperwork here and forget you ever heard of me or Kramer or Carbone.”
She said nothing.
“And speak to the guys who were there last night. Tell them to forget what they saw.”
She looked down at the floor.
“Then go back to the O Club and wait for your next assignment.”
She looked up at me.
“Are you serious?” she said.
“Totally,” I said. “I’m giving you a direct order.”
She stared at me. “You’re not the man I thought you were.”
I nodded.
“I agree,” I said. “I’m not.”
She walked out and I gave her a minute to get clear and then I picked up the folded paper she had left behind. There was a lot of it. I found the page I wanted, and I stared at it.
Because I don’t like coincidences.
Vassell and Coomer had e
ntered Bird by the main gate at six forty-five in the evening of the night Carbone had died. They had left again at ten o’clock. Three and a quarter hours, right across Carbone’s time of death.
Or right across dinnertime.
I picked up the phone and called the O Club dining room. A mess sergeant told me the NCO in charge would call me back. Then I called my own sergeant and asked her to find out who was my opposite number at Fort Irwin, and to get him on the line. She came in four minutes later with a mug of coffee for me.
“He’s all tied up,” she said. “Could be half an hour. His name is Franz.”
“Can’t be,” I said. “Franz is in Panama. I talked to him there face-to-face.”
“Major Calvin Franz,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”
“Call them back,” I said. “Double-check.”
She left my coffee on my desk and went back out to her phone. Came in again after another four minutes and confirmed that her information had been correct.
“Major Calvin Franz,” she said again. “He’s been there since December twenty-ninth.”
I looked down at my calendar. January 5th.
“And you’ve been here since December twenty-ninth,” she said.
I looked straight at her.
“Call some more posts,” I said. “The big ones only. Start with Fort Benning, and work through the alphabet. Get me the names of their MP XOs, and find out how long they’ve been there.”
She nodded and went back out. The NCO from the dining room called me back. I asked him about Vassell and Coomer. He confirmed they had eaten dinner in the O Club. Vassell had gone with the halibut, and Coomer had opted for the steak.
“Did they eat on their own?” I asked.
“No, sir, they were with an assortment of senior officers,” the guy said.
“Was it a date?”
“No, sir, we had the impression it was impromptu. It was an odd collection of people. I think they all hooked up in the bar, over aperitifs. Certainly we had no reservation for the group.”
“How long were they there?”
“They were seated before seven-thirty, and they got up just before ten o’clock.”
“Nobody left and came back?”
“No, sir, they were under our eye throughout.”
“All the time?”